Obfuscating Android code with ProGuard
You can obfuscate Android code to provide security against reverse engineering.
You can use the Android ProGuard tool to obfuscate, shrink, and optimize your code. Obfuscated code can be more difficult for other people to reverse engineer. ProGuard renames classes, fields, and methods with semantically obscure names and removes unused code.
IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Foundation provides
a file that contains all of the necessary configuration information
to run Android ProGuard obfuscation with a MobileFirst application.
This file is called proguard-project.txt and
is located in the MobileFirst Android
native folder. Use Proguard 5.2. To change the Proguard version, replace
the proguard folder with the new one in the android-sdk/tools folder.
Important: Because the tool obfuscates all Java™ files, consider that you will have to spend
some time and resources to make it work, especially if you use libraries
from other software vendors.
- Example
Obfuscation with ProGuard results in changes to file names and to code as displayed in these examples. - Creating an obfuscated APK file from MobileFirst Studio
To create an obfuscated application package (.apk) file in IBM MobileFirst Platform Studio, you edit the Android native project properties file, then build your application in release mode. - Creating an obfuscated APK file from a command line
You can create an obfuscated Android application package with command-line tools. - Restoring an obfuscated stack trace
The ProGuard obfuscation process results in an obfuscated stack trace. To recover the original stack trace, you can run a retrace script. - Code size reduction from obfuscation
Using ProGuard can reduce the size of your code.
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